LeftyByDefault.com – Laura Overstreet

The House on Teacher's Lane book cover, courtesy of Rachel Simon

Rachel Simon, bestselling author of Riding The Bus with My Sister, is releasing the paperback edition of her latest book, The House on Teacher’s Lane, on Tuesday, May 25th. I read Riding The Bus with My Sister, a memoir about Simon and her sister Beth who has developmental disabilities, when it came out in 2002 after I caught an excerpt of it in Rosie O’Donnell’s former magazine. I was an instant fan. A few weeks ago, as our own home underwent a kitchen renovation, I read Building a Home with My Husband, now titled The House on Teacher’s Lane, Simon’s latest memoir about the renovation of her and her husband’s home and the many relationships in her life.

Simon and her husband had just married after a 19-year on and off courtship. They were living in an older row house in Wilmington, Delaware, and it was time renovate. Hal, Simon’s husband, is an architect, and took on the job of designing and working on some of the house while Rachel helped within and outside of her comfort zone of household renovations and soon found the process precipitated personal renovations as well.

As I got deeper into the story, I went back to Simon’s website and found she had recently started a blog. Her blog is an author’s blog, beautifully filled with stories and pictures of her life that draw in the reader; they are mini Rachel Simon memoirs. I felt like I knew her even more, her commitment to disability issues thriving, and decided to e-mail her and gush about her work. She replied and we found a wonderful connection.

Rachel joined me for an interview about The House on Teacher’s Lane and our discussion follows.

Laura: A major theme of the book is that “stuff happens.” I often say that life happens, whether we want it to or not, and for me it may relate to aspects of disability or any number of things that happen in our lives from the mundane to the extraordinary. What does “stuff happens” mean in the context of The House on Teacher’s Lane?

Rachel: Great question! There is the past that is the setup for it and the present as I am living in it; the book is a weaving together of the past and the present. The house contains the past, as well as the present. Some of the key things from the past that I contemplate in the present are my relationship with my spouse – the 13-year relationship, then the 6-year break up, and then we got married; the stuff as a kid that casts a shadow on the breakup, and my mother where she kind of “loses it” when I was a teenager and disappeared – these are the personal “stuff happens.” Plus, all those relationships I talk about with siblings and friends.

In the present and the construction of the house, there was a very, very big calamitous “stuff happens.” I won’t give that away. Up until then I was very fearful of things that can happen during renovation and knew them from Hal and other people’s stories. So, “stuff happens” and I think when you are dealing with both the heart and the home, you kind of have to expect it, and you have to deal with it, give to the people working in your home and receive what they give you, monitor your own reactions, and be open to it.

I do see the book, and even though it is not a disability book, I do see it as a disability philosophy. Part of this is that “stuff happens” and what do you do? Say, “oh, my life is over” or “okay, we’re going to get on with it.” When you grow up with disability in some way you realize that the people who don’t live with disability often perceive the world as being two worlds – those with and those without disability. But those who live with disability know there really is only one world, but then there are two worlds, too. That is, when you live with disability, you have much more of a “okay, we’re going to get on with it” attitude. You don’t think, “Good things happen to good people, bad things to bad people.” To me, that whole way of looking at the world – that good and bad happen no matter who you are, and you just need to get on with it – is at the heart of this book.

Laura: That’s always bothered me. I remember realizing, maybe in my early twenties, that’s not true. Bad things happen to good people all the time, but then we have to define “bad” anyway.

Rachel: Exactly. You may do the right things and get a different reward. A disability philosophy wastes no time on worrying about all of that.

Laura: A similar point came up in the “First Mornings/Self” chapter, when you use the Plan D example from Dan Wilkins’ perspective of acquired disability: “It isn’t life on auto-pilot anymore. If you want to figure out how to do something, you give it a shot, and if Plan A doesn’t work, you go to Plan B, and then you go to plan C, and then Plan D.” You have already answered this some, but what are your thoughts on this disability perspective in the everyday lives of all people?

Rachel: I mention Bill Stillman in the book too. He has autism and speaks about entering the passion of people with autism. I realized when I was riding the buses with Beth that I entered her passion and that I hadn’t done that with my mother. The book is filled with the disability perspective, every chapter seems to have something. A big one is that happiness doesn’t require perfection.

Laura: I find Hal’s Buddhist approach to life intriguing and am a bit jealous of his even keel.  How did that influence all of the overlapping renovation processes?

Rachel: Part of it was that it made me calmer, helped me keep things in perspective so I wouldn’t blow things out of proportion, because he stayed calm. He said, “Let’s say we don’t end up doing the renovation. We still live in a place that would be a palace to most people in the world.”

On the other hand, if you want to get annoyed, if you want validation for those feelings, it gets harder. He was accepting of my frustration, but I also realized the uselessness of it. It helped in handling the disaster.

Back to the disability perspective for a moment, though. Many people have a transition process when disability enters their lives, whether they’re individuals or parents. And for some people that transition process changes them in ways that are not beneficial to living their lives. One of the great things about the movement is how it helps people transition positively. One of the things I encounter in speaking about disability are parents of children who are my sister’s age, when institutionalization was more common. It really went against the grain for Beth to be out in the public, but we just thought that was the right way to be, and of course it was, and is. But some of these parents feel shame and guilt for how they handled their child. Some were encouraged to feel shame and guilt by society, too – like, the whole idea of a person with a disability needing to be kept hidden. There are lots of complex feelings around this, even among parents of teenagers with disabilities now. I’ve had many talk to me about the grief they go through with every milestone their child does not reach. My parents didn’t have any of this. They just got through it. And their example helped me work through things in my own life. You can be disappointed, but you don’t have to grieve over and over. And goodness knows, shame has no place in any of this.

Laura: Much of your writing is reflective on your childhood and relationships with family and friends. What are some of the most important things you learned through these experiences?

Rachel: Oh, wow, there are so many! The big one for this book is that stuff happens but repair can happen. If you think that way, you recognize that loss and sorrow doesn’t have to be permanent. You can work with yourself or perhaps the other person. The corollary is that if you are in a relationship that may seem irrevocably broken, one of the best things to do is to keep your heart open. What I sometimes find is that if I think someone did me wrong, it was not even about me. I learn they had their own issues, and that’s what they were wrestling with; I was just caught in their own psychic crossfire. So I try to keep my heart open, and maintain the default sense of compassion. I really try not to impugn motive. It’s universal almost, if you tell someone about an injury that another person did to you, the person you’re speaking to will almost always impugn the motive. They’ll say, “Well, he did that because he…” and the “because” will be something really despicable about that person. But how do they really know? Impugning motive is a way of minimizing the other person, and shutting them off. Allow yourself to be open to an explanation. It’s a helpful way to live.

During the disaster we discovered a few errors and I wanted to be angry. Hal has a co-worker who says, and I put this in the book, ‘Never ascribe to malevolence what you can just as easily chalk up to incompetence.’ I think of this all the time, especially with all the political conflict we have in America right now. People on the radio and TV just make a constant assumption of malevolence instead of incompetence. It’s so destructive to operate that way.

Laura: Finally, one of my favorite parts of the book is when you come to a major setback in the renovation, the disaster. You recall a discussion with a friend about why so much had gone wrong in your life, and your friend talked about Emanuel Swedenborg’s work, that maybe there was no reason, or more specifically, that nothing happens in our lives out of which something good cannot occur. Can you tell me more about how this shapes your life?

Rachel: For one thing, when my friend told that me, it was in the context of breaking up with Hal, but also all my life I used to get furious, I would get so frustrated when people would tell me that everything happens for a reason.

Laura: Oh, I hate that! Sometimes things just happen.

Rachel: Right! And when I was younger I would ask them, and I used the language of the time, “well, then why is my sister mentally disabled?,” and people would give all kinds of reasons, saying it makes me a better person. It always got me angry and furthered my sense of distance from people who don’t know anything about the disability world. The way my friend explained Swedenborg’s viewpoint was vaguely close to other people’s “everything happens for a reason,” but different. It gives free will. Swedenborg’s phrase first helped with Hal, but then it helped with disability aspects of my life, and then it helped with a work experience where I could bring good into people’s lives, and it helps you live a life that is as close to good as it can be. I also found the secret to happiness in this book – infinite flexibility with the path and the goal.

What a great way to end our discussion! Don’t wait to pick up or order Rachel Simon’s The House on Teacher’s Lane. Check out Rachel’s website, www.rachelsimon.com. Her blog is there too, as are many, many tips on writing. If you go to Facebook, you can find a personal page for her as well as book pages for Riding the Bus With My Sister and The House on Teacher’s Lane—and on those book pages, she has tons of pictures of the renovation and the set of the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for Riding the Bus With My Sister. Rachel has also just started using Twitter, so you can follow her there, too!